A Law Unto Himself

A Law Unto Himself
PENNY JORDAN

She'd been left waiting at the altar…— And when her English godparents offered Francesca an escape from the suffocating pity of the Italian aristocracy of which she was part, she accepted gratefully. Their tranquil Cotswolds home would let her put her life in order.— Then she met their reclusive neighbour, novelist Oliver Newton, a man with a reputation for breaking female hearts. Her attraction to him was sudden, overwhelming and dangerous.For all the great poise that her upbringing had taught her quickly started to dissolve when she looked into his silvery eyes.

Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

A Law Unto Himself

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Table of Contents

Cover (#ub7676f8d-84d1-50b5-948d-947603354f8c)

Concept Page (#uc67fc374-0189-5a92-9d99-09330a1193a2)

About the Author (#ufbda2ceb-485c-50a0-8de1-e545a6c393e6)

Title Page (#u88ac1021-048c-56cd-b7b2-6a2fdd04a829)

Chapter One (#ulink_b9ed40a9-dd87-55b9-9e1f-a5d0daf5f120)

Chapter Two (#ulink_12b2234b-f3e3-5c42-8d66-c4f7f3d92e5a)

Chapter Three (#ulink_5de9ac87-7b5c-51da-9ce2-0c4bbd8366a9)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

End Page (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_812b6163-f73d-5a8c-b4ae-24d22db9322c)

AS THE ALITALIA plane circled the city of her birth, Francesca looked down on it with a faint frown of mingled bewilderment and pain that touched the heart of the stewardess walking down the aisle, and prompted her to comment to her co-workers that it was disconcerting to see such a look of vulnerable loneliness on such a beautiful woman’s face.

‘Who are you talking about?’ the chief stewardess asked her.

‘The woman four rows from the front, with the beautiful cashmere separates and the long dark hair.’

‘Ah, yes… Francesca di Valeria.’

‘You know her?’ the more junior stewardess enquired.

‘Not personally.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘She’s way out of my social league, but I know of her. She comes from a family of very wealthy industrialists. She was due to marry the son of an equally powerful and wealthy family this summer, but the wedding had to be called off at the last moment because the groom had secretly married someone else. There was quite a lot in the papers about it at the time.’ She gave a cynical shrug. ‘Her family were well compensated for their embarrassment. A large contract from the family of the exbridegroom. And it was an arranged match, anyway. Everyone knows that.’

If Francesca had been able to overhear her comments, they wouldn’t have surprised her. In the close-knit, gossipy world of the Italian aristocracy, it was common knowledge that their two families had decided that she and Paolo would eventually marry while they themselves were in their cradles. The marriage hadn’t even been by her parents’ choice but by her grandfather’s, the powerful, autocratic and extremely domineering Duca di Valeria, and Francesca had grown up knowing that one day she would be Paolo’s wife.

She had not been in love with him, it was true, but she had grown so used to the idea of eventually being his wife that the shock of discovering that he had deserted her, practically at the altar, for someone else had thrown her into complete disruption.

Her whole life… her education… everything had been geared towards her becoming Paolo’s wife, towards the fact that one day she would take over from Paolo’s mother, the present Marchesa, as the matriarch of the family—a family with vast interests in commerce and industry; a family with a history that spanned many generations; a proud, upright, formidable family, much like her own.

Now all that was gone.

Paolo’s sisters and cousins avoided her if they saw her in the street. Their mutual friends made embarrassed murmurs of sympathy; even her own grandfather sometimes looked at her with an irate pity that said more than any words that he blamed her in part for Paolo’s defection.

And it was because of this… this almost total severing of her life with a blow that left her unable to go back to what had once been, and yet with no clear idea in her mind of her way forward, that she was leaving her home.

She had a university education and a good brain. Gone were the days when Italian daughters were kept cosseted and protected from the world.

She had even worked for a while, albeit for her godfather, but there had been a tacit understanding that this leniency—this delay in her marriage to Paolo—was a tactful means of allowing him time to mature and come to realise what an asset she would be as his wife.

Such marriages were not uncommon among the families that formed the social circle in which her family moved. Marriage was, after all, a serious business, involving not only the young couple concerned but also their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

The hardest thing of all to bear had been the silences that seemed to fall whenever she walked into a room… the way people watched her, discussed her, pitied her… for who would marry her now? She who had been destined almost from birth for such a high position.

She had endured it for as long as she could, through a mixture of pride and concern for her parents.

Her grandfather had never approved of his eldest son’s choice of bride, the pretty English girl who had come to Italy to care for the twin nieces of his cousin, but her father had insisted on marrying her and they had been very, very happy.

The birth of three sons, followed by a daughter, had gone a long way to softening the Duca’s attitude, but now, with Paolo’s rejection of Francesca, all the old bitterness had flared up, and her grandfather, whose fiery temper was notorious, had almost gone as far as to suggest that it was because of Francesca’s English blood that Paolo had left her for someone else.